There has been much talk in recent years about the problem of pilotitis in public innovation, with money wasted on innovations that don’t go anywhere. Back in 2012, Uganda placed a moratorium on mobile health pilots due to failures of integration. As recently as last year, a report on innovation in the UK’s National Health Service noted “no clear route from pilot to BAU [business-as-usual]”. This systemic failure is a direct downstream consequence of a failure of innovation governance.

A foundational misstep of public innovation was the indiscriminate adoption of the private sector R&D framing, with the idea of developing and piloting new products and services under controlled conditions before scaling out. This approach works for simple solutions that are easily substitutable with minimal costs or disruption, but it fails when confronted with many of the complex realities of public management. R&D innovation strips away context, but in complex environments, context is everything.

Context-sensitive innovation

The inspiration for this essay is VillageReach, a healthcare NGO I had the opportunity to engage with last year while conducting research on humanitarian supply chains. VillageReach recognise the value of context-sensitive innovation. Their entire approach is predicated on building local capabilities, working closely with communities as end users and target groups, and governments as a critical partner for long-term sustainability.

In Liberia, VillageReach and Last Mile Health partnered with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) around a shared vision to digitise medical supply chains. The team started out by recognising the importance of community health workers (CHWs), who would be absolutely critical to long-term embedding of any new tools. That meant engaging deeply to understand what their roles entailed and the challenges they faced in their day-to-day routines.

By taking a step-by-step approach, the VillageReach team were able to ensure that the CHWs were brought along the journey as co-developers of a new digital platform, that the level of technology was appropriate for the context, and that the end result was no more complicated than the needs of the present moment and environment demanded. In time, 1,428 CHWs and supervisors were using the new system, serving over 200,000 households.

Context-sensitive innovation unfolds one step at a time, starting with existing in situ capabilities and gradually probing what Stuart Kauffman calls the adjacent possible—all the ways in which the present might be reinvented through the novel repurposing and recombination of technologies, institutions, and practices. Moving in this direction requires three interconnected and overlapping shifts in how innovation is governed and managed.

Shift 1: Fund direction, not designs

The Cynefin framework for navigating complexity distinguishes between governing constraints that determine outputs, and enabling constraints that channel behaviour in a particular direction while allowing for emergence. The difference between what VillageReach gets right, and what often goes wrong, is in large part due to the ways in which funding models establish these different kinds of constraint.

VillageReach emphasise radical collaboration with government, built on funding models that establish flexible enabling constraints. This means identifying opportunities where the government is willing to act as “payer at scale” for new infrastructure, and support the co-development of new capabilities with flexible funding. As Wayan Vota advocated in a recent post for ICTworks, VillageReach design for government funding, not for restricted donor grants.

By contrast, traditional R&D funding tends to establish governing constraints. Because funding is often competitive and provided on the basis of up-front designs, innovators are incentivised to anchor proposals to the technological frontier, and these designs are then locked in for delivery. R&D funding based on up-front designs then constrains onward development, allowing only for “nearby” pivots. The space for open-ended exploration is reduced.

In complex environments, context-sensitive funding allows organisations to retain strategic optionality while channeling efforts towards lasting outcomes. It sets the direction and boundary conditions without mandating a fixed path. This means flexible grants based on alignment of values, core strengths, and strategic intent, ideally combined with advance market commitments from domestic sources that guarantee long-term financing for newly-developed capabilities.

Shift 2: Manage for emergence

In Lagos, Nigeria, a VillageReach project to extend the user reach of a telehealth platform found that trust was a key issue. This prompted a major pivot to develop a new service, working with kiosk agents in markets and pharmacies as trusted intermediaries to provide health checks and connect patients to doctors using the platform. This ability to learn, draw on existing capabilities, and make strategic pivots, is critical to context-sensitive innovation.

R&D innovation often relies on up-front research to design a solution before getting iterative feedback during development. It might result in an acceptable output, but the process treats feedback as a mechanism for tactical refinement rather than strategic discovery. Teams test hypotheses and iterate designs, but the final form remains locked in. Agile management is trapped inside a cage of linear product development.

In their article “Against Design”, Caryn Devins, Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman and Teppo Felin argue that in complex environments it is impossible to design an optimal solution to a given problem up-front because there are an unknowable number of variables, making future contingencies impossible to predict. Instead of focusing on up-front research and design, they argue for adaptive systems that allow capabilities to evolve organically.

The idea is to find what works for the specific place and time, not to pursue a universal solution. Enabling constraints set the direction and open-ended exploration allows for the emergence of new capabilities. In Lagos, the team discovered that trust, not access, was the real barrier to expanding the user base of the telehealth platform. Therefore, getting more users on the platform was not a viable or appropriate target. The next step was to explore an in-person service.

Shift 3: Co-evolve capabilities

Pilot projects often succeed precisely because they ignore context, intentionally bypassing the institutional change required for the solution to eventually become embedded. Instead, they operate under controlled conditions with highly-motivated teams, extra resources, and shielding from bureaucracy. When attempts are made to integrate these solutions into business-as-usual, they meet the reality of legacy systems, varying human behaviours, and local politics and culture.

Successful pilot solutions rapidly break down at scale. The complexity circumvented by the pilot still exists, and when the mostly pre-specified design is finalised, the team finds they are stuck because local skills and institutional infrastructure haven’t co-evolved with the solution. With just a dash of hyperbole, it’s like spending all available capital on engineering a car in a place where there are no roads, no petrol stations, no car mechanics, and no one can drive.

R&D innovation incentivises working backwards from an abstract global frontier, creating a disconnect with local context. The result is coordination failure as the now-apparent requirements for investment in adaptation and infrastructure outweigh the appetite of funders. Overly optimistic expectations meet complex realities, and energy quickly dissipates. A bicycle might’ve been a better fit for our metaphorical mobility problem.

By comparison, context-sensitive innovation works forward from what exists locally. In Liberia, the VillageReach project began with co-exchange of knowledge around the work of CHWs and the importance of supply chain management. It proceeded by combining digital literacy training with co-development of a digital tool, gradually introducing new features so that CHW practices could co-evolve with the platform. At the same time, institutional structures evolved to integrate local data delivery into national decision-making platforms.

Escaping the trap of pilotitis

Traditional R&D focuses on “solutions” as standalone outputs that can be developed in one context and deployed in another with a bit of training and a few adjustments. But complex systems are relational. Context-sensitive innovation recognises that “solutions” are ephemeral. The core value is not found in a transferable “unit” of innovation, but in nurturing a co-evolving repertoire of technologies, practices, and institutions.

Pilotitis is a predictable result of R&D frameworks misapplied to complex social systems that require continuous adaptation. Escaping this trap requires shifting from a mindset of product/service development and scaling to one of managing for emergence and the co-evolution of capabilities, rooted in respect for the unknowable variables of local context. The aim is not to deliver a singular solution, but to leave a new set of capabilities to build on.

The persistence of pilotitis, however, suggests that the trap is hard to escape. R&D innovation holds the imminent promise of a global solution, making it look cheap up-front. As leaders look for attention-grabbing ideas and optimism bias takes over, pilot projects seem like a relatively inexpensive way to demonstrate learning and progress—even if much of it proves illusory. The hidden costs of pilotitis are fatigue, cynicism, and years of wasted momentum.

By contrast, context-sensitive innovation is locally-led and participatory by nature, requiring significant up-front investment in relationship building and early adaptation, and a relinquishing of top-down control. But this up-front investment secures a pathway to lasting impact, avoiding the development of over-specified solutions and the trap of pilotitis. The “slower and more expensive path” is faster, cheaper, and more equitable in the long run.

Sources

Aggrey, A. (2023) ‘A New Digital Solution to Support Liberia’s Community Health Workers’, VillageReach, 5 May. Available at: https://www.villagereach.org/2023/05/05/a-new-digital-solution-to-support-liberias-community-health-workers/.

Chamberlain, S. (2012) ‘Pilot-itis: What’s the cure?’, BBC Media Action, 20 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/stories/pilotitis-whats-the-cure.

Devins, C. et al. (2015) ‘Against Design’, Arizona State Law Journal, 47(3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2570030.

Greenberg, R. and Bertsch, B. (eds) (2022) Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World. 2nd edition. The Cynefin Company. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/library/cynefin-weaving-sense-making-into-the-fabric-of-our-world/.

UCLPartners (2025) State of the Nation: Insights from UK Health Innovators. London: UCLPartners. Available at: https://uclpartners.com/landmark-report-reveals-hidden-barriers-to-nhs-innovation/.

VillageReach (2019) Goals and Strategies 2020-2023. Seattle, WA: VillageReach. Available at: https://www.villagereach.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/VillageReach_Goals-Strategies_FY20_FY23.pdf.

VillageReach (2024) Beyond the Health Facility: Strengthening Community Supply Chains. VillageReach. Available at: https://www.villagereach.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/VR_SupplyChainIntegrators_Technical-Brief_Liberia-Strengthening-Community-SI-2.pdf.

VillageReach (2026) 2025 Annual Impact Report. Seattle, WA: VillageReach. Available at: https://www.villagereach.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/VR_2025AnnualReport_EN.pdf.

Vota, W. (2026) ‘Please Stop Designing Humanitarian Solutions for Donor Funding’, ICTworks, 9 July. Available at: https://www.ictworks.org/designing-humanitarian-solutions-for-donor-funding/.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they’ve thought more about their experiences than other people.”
- Steve Jobs

I know it’s a cliche to start an article about creativity and innovation with a quote from Steve Jobs, but he makes the point well and his intuition aligns with the evidence. Creativity is just connecting things. It’s mostly about exposing yourself to lots of existing ideas, absorbing and combining those influences, and having a go through trial-and-error tinkering. Last week’s essay provided a close-up case study of the revolutionary potential of combinatorial creativity. This week’s focuses on four simple behaviours that unlock creative potential.

Engage widely with people and culture

Creative people seek out new experiences. They read a lot. They read widely. They engage with different forms of culture. They have a diverse network. They chase new connections. Exposing oneself to diverse ideas, people, and cultures is rooted in openness to experience, which research identifies as the single strongest personality predictor of creative achievement. By engaging widely with people and culture, you can feed fresh perspectives into your core creative work.

When this broad exploration is combined with domain mastery, it forms a “T-shaped” knowledge profile. This describes an individual who possesses deep expertise and experience in one domain (the vertical stem of the “T”), coupled with a wide breadth of knowledge and curiosity across many different domains (the horizontal crossbar of the “T”). The term was popularised by IDEO’s Tim Brown, and reflects research by Dean Keith Simonton showing that leading scientists, writers, artists, and politicians usually display curiosity outside their primary fields.

Deep expertise in one domain can result in a high degree of mental rigidity, where the mind defaults to certain categories and explanations for things. Exposure to different cultures or disciplines forces the brain to re-evaluate its existing frameworks, particularly when those cultures or disciplines understand the world in an inherently different way. As anyone who has spent enough time immersed in a different culture will attest, it is only when you step outside your own culture that you truly begin to sense the extent to which you have been subconsciously conditioned by it.

Living abroad or engaging deeply in unfamiliar cultural environments significantly improves our capacity to identify hidden patterns and forge links between seemingly distant concepts. Historically, periods of cultural influx and immigration have often preceded major surges in creative achievement, precisely because the collision of distinct worldviews disrupts conventional thinking and breeds novel perspectives. Abraham Maslow described moving to New York in the 1930s amid a renaissance in psychology, sparked by the mass emigration of Jewish and European psychoanalysts, psychologists, and anthropologists.

Ultimately, creativity is a primarily social phenomenon, relying on the cross-pollination of ideas between people and cultures. People who maintain broad social networks generate more innovative outcomes than those who only engage with similar peers. In network theory, a dynamic known as the “strength of weak ties” describes how we mostly exist in social clusters where we each know the same people and the same information, and it is our casual acquaintances (weak ties) who act as critical bridges to new environments, information, and ideas.

Capture thoughts and observations

During the 16th and 17th centuries no aspiring intellectual would dream of venturing outside without a book in hand to take notes of their observations. While the practice of “commonplacing” has its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, the trend took off when the 16th century influencer, Erasmus, began instructing his students on how to keep a notebook for gathering quotes, metaphors, and moral lessons. A century later, John Locke pioneered a popular new indexing technique for commonplace notebooks, delighting 17th century stationery obsessives.

As told by Steven Johnson, Charles Darwin was a commonplacer, making meticulous notes during his travels in the 19th century. In the pages of his notebook, he sketched flora and fauna, carefully noted his observations, and jotted down speculative ideas. He would regularly review past notes in the light of present thoughts. It was while on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean that a sudden idea prompted him to revisit his five-month-old Galápagos observations, opening up a new line of thinking that would become the theory of natural selection.

More recent commonplacers include the writers Joan Didion and Marina Keegan. Didion reflected in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”, that it was not to log her activities, or to make notes about other people, but to “remember what it was to be me”. Marina Keegan, who found fame after her death in 2012 at the age of just twenty-two, kept a notebook called “Interesting stuff”, that she described as containing “everything from descriptions of a waiter’s hand gestures, to my cab driver’s eyes, to strange things that happen to me or a way to phrase something.”

Capturing and documenting ideas, whether as notes, sketches, diagrams, or formulas, serves as a critical bridge between fleeting mental sparks and sustained creative work. Because partial insights and slow hunches are easily lost to daily distractions, maintaining a habit of recording thoughts, sights, and murky intuitions preserves them for future inspiration. Apps such as DEVONthink, Notion, and Obsidian provide a digital alternative to commonplacing, allowing you to organise, search, and link your thoughts in a personal knowledge base. I use Obsidian because it’s free, flexible, and uses an open format that prioritises privacy and ownership.

Play around with ideas

“A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it.”
- Pablo Picasso

We create things as embodied beings participating in a physical and material world. Playing with ideas occurs through activities such as drafting, sketching, modelling, and prototyping, where the final form is discovered rather than predetermined. When an individual plays with tools or materials, those objects offer affordances—latent possibilities that cannot be predicted through abstract thought alone. As a painter doesn’t know every brushstroke before they begin to paint, a writer rarely anticipates the full shape of a thought until they begin to write.

When Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece, Guernica, his process involved 45 preliminary sketches full of false starts, discarded variations, and structural revisions. Without a preconceived end, each false start revealed new possibilities. This emergence of hidden affordances throughout the artistic process leads to a dialogue between the creator and the medium. Instead of starting with a predefined goal and mentally preconceiving the output, tinkering allows the creator to embrace ambiguity and uncover new meanings and functions along the journey.

The results of two separate experiments in the creative arts and industrial design reinforce this picture. In a landmark study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels demonstrated that actively seeking discovery at the outset of a creative project determined the originality of the output. The most original outcomes arose when students experimented with subject matter and varied compositions, allowing the initial marks on canvas to suggest subsequent steps. Conversely, those who set out with a clear idea of what they wanted to draw or convey produced significantly less creative outputs.

These findings echo those of psychologist Bryan Lawson, whose experiments in design contrasted analytical and generative strategies. Those who applied analytical strategies solved puzzles by systematically studying the problem to discover a fundamental rule that would lead to the best solution. By contrast, those who applied generative strategies immediately started proposing and evaluating different potential designs, recognising that design problems rarely possess a single, predefined optimal solution—much like creating an original work of art.

In “Wired to Create”, Scott Barry Kauffman and Carolyn Gregoire emphasise the importance of integrating both imaginative and rational modes of thought. They describe the way in which creativity involves toggling between spontaneous, exploratory generation and deliberate, reflective evaluation. By maintaining a spirit of play, interspersed with bouts of rigorous critical reflection, creators of all stripes—whether artists, writers, designers, inventors, or scientists—can gradually transform a raw hunch into a finished work.

Make time to do nothing

Rest assured of the importance of being idle. Creativity requires periods of unstructured idleness where the conscious mind relaxes its grip. On a neurobiological level, research shows that leisure time lets the brain’s executive function wind down, enabling imagination to take over. This shift allows the mind to shuffle subconscious fragments and forge novel connections beneath conscious awareness. Give your mind permission to wander, and let your best ideas surface on their own.

Low-key physical activities provide ideal conditions for this subconscious percolation, separating us from the demands of work and home, and quietening mental preoccupations. According market research for a showerhead supplier, 72% of people report experiencing fresh insights in the shower! Going for a walk is another well-evidenced catalyst for creativity, triggering physiological shifts that place the brain in a fertile associative state. History is replete with “thinker-walkers”, including Charles Darwin, as well as Virginia Woolf and Friedrich Nietzsche. On this point, I strongly advise adopting a dog.

Idle time is not a mark of laziness or wasted effort, but an indispensable stage in the cycle of creative work. (Sadly, this very real insight is lost on employers, who can track your time staring at a screen but cannot measure the productivity gains of having a little lie down in the afternoon.) Creativity requires balancing protracted periods of preparation and play, with dedicated periods of idleness, giving our unconscious mind the necessary space to connect lingering hunches and serve up some inspiration.

A final note on AI and creativity

LLMs clearly have a role to play in fostering combinatorial creativity. I personally find that prompts such as, “How does idea A relate to idea B?”, or “Tell me about concept X through the lens of concept Y”, can aid my thinking and provide inspiration, with the caveats of checking sources and maintaining a critical stance towards outputs. But despite the hype, LLMs have no access to real-world context and rely primarily on inductive pattern-matching across datasets, making them good for some things and not others. These constraints may prove to be fundamental limitations.

Andrea Roli, Johannes Jaeger, and Stuart Kauffman argue that meaning-making plays a critical role in human creativity, and that this is unique to biological life. We can recognise that the meaning of a word or use of an object is dependent on context, rather than being an intrinsic property of the word or object itself. We can spot affordances and improvise or repurpose everyday objects in a way that artificial intelligence cannot. Roli and colleagues conclude that radical creativity requires organismic agency—a drive to survive and navigate the physical world that is beyond computation. If they are right, we may yet keep our creative edge.

Sources

Cross, N. (1982) ‘Designerly ways of knowing’, Design Studies, 3(4), pp. 221–227. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(82)90040-0.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014) The Systems Model of Creativity: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9085-7.

Johnson, S. (2010) Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. London: Penguin Books. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56300/where-good-ideas-come-from-by-johnson-steven/9780141964591.

Kaufman, S.B. (2022) Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. London, UK: Sheldon Press. Available at: https://www.sheldonpress.co.uk/titles/scott-barry-kaufman/transcend/9781399805582/.

Kaufman, S.B. and Gregoire, C. (2015) Wired to Create. London, UK: Vermilion. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/433236/wired-to-create-by-dr-scott-barry-kaufman-and-carolyn-gregoire/9781785040641.

Parrish, S. (no date) ‘Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook’. Farnam Street. Available at: https://fs.blog/keeping-a-notebook/.

Parrish, S. (no date) ‘Steve Jobs on Creativity’. Farnam Street. Available at: https://fs.blog/steve-jobs-on-creativity/.

Roli, A., Jaeger, J. and Kauffman, S.A. (2022) ‘How Organisms Come to Know the World: Fundamental Limits on Artificial General Intelligence’, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.806283.

Simonton, D.K. (1999) Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity. Oxford University PressNew York, NY. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195128796.001.0001.

Watts, D.J. (2004) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York , NY: Norton. Available at: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393325423.

I have been a fan of hip hop since my teenage years, and I still retain a love for The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, J Dilla, Madlib, MF Doom, and others from the indie rap era of the 1990s and 2000s that betray my age. A few years ago I even convinced my wife and some friends to go on a hip hop bus tour in New York, where I was volunteered to dress up like Flavor Flav (read on for the photo, you’re welcome). So it seems fitting to kick of this Substack with a story about the origins of hip hop. Come for the music history, stay for the theoretical biology...

The Bronx, New York, 1973

Legend has it that the very first hip hop party took place on 11 August 1973 in the Bronx, New York, with DJ Kool Herc on the turntables. Herc’s real name was Clive Campbell and he grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, where he got into music through sound system culture and hanging around neighbourhood dance hall parties. Aged 13, Campbell emigrated with his family to New York, where they moved into an apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx.

Campbell got the nickname “Hercules” while playing basketball, which evolved into “Kool Herc” when he joined a graffiti crew, and “DJ Kool Herc” when he got his own sound system and started playing funk records at parties organised by his sister, Cindy. When he played, the best dancers would wait for the breaks, going wild during the percussion-led interludes. Wanting to please the “breakers” and keep the energy levels high, Herc began tinkering with new mixing techniques.

In summer 1973 Cindy organised a back to school party in their apartment block’s recreation room. It was here that Herc debuted his “merry-go-round” technique, getting two copies of the same record, and playing the same break on both records back-to-back. With Coke La Roc joining Herc as the party MC, rhyming shout-outs to the crowd in a rhythmic style that borrowed from dancehall MCs and entertainers like Pigmeat Markham, hip hop was born.

Grandmaster Flash, another aspiring local DJ, took what Herc started and perfected it. A self-confessed geek with a passion for electronics, Flash was always tinkering with audio equipment. He also experimented with turntable techniques. While Herc could extend a break, transitions were often jarring because the needle had to be dropped at precisely the right moment. One day, frustrated, Flash placed his fingers on the vinyl and stopped it. Then released it. And stopped it again. He realised then that he could manipulate the vinyl directly.

Flash’s next breakthrough was to solve a mechanical friction problem between the vinyl and the turntable. Whenever he held the record, the rubber mat underneath would grip the steel platter and stop the motor. Removing the mat entirely would ruin the record. Flash’s mother was a seamstress so he knew about materials and realised that a felt mat could be the solution. He cut some felt to the right size, sprayed it with his mother’s starch, and ironed it until it became stiff. Flash called his new invention a “wafer”. Today, it’s called a slipmat.

Still, the setup wasn’t perfect. Flash tested dozens of styluses to find one that would stay inside the groove as the record was manipulated. Next, he needed a turntable with a high level of torque so that it would engage immediately after the vinyl was released. He tested anything he could find that might do the job, even a Fisher Price toy model. Eventually, he came across a Technics turntable at a local store, powered it up, and found his answer. That model was a predecessor to the now-legendary Technics SL-1200s.

Flash was finally able to take a break that lasted only 10-15 seconds and loop it back and forth seamlessly, extending it to minutes. This was more than a technical achievement. Flash broke the established norms of DJ culture. As he describes it, “The taboo thing was that you’re not really supposed to touch the middle of the vinyl. DJs are gonna hate you.” Building on what Herc started, Flash broke with tradition to redefine the record deck, from a consumer good designed for playback, into a musical instrument in its own right.

Revolution, one step at a time

In 1996, the same year The Fugees released “The Score” and Jay Z released “Reasonable Doubt”, Stuart Kauffman released “Investigations: The Nature of Autonomous Agents and the Worlds They Mutually Create”, a landmark working paper for the Santa Fe Institute. It was in this paper that Kauffman coined the term “adjacent possible”, from which this Substack takes its name. Kauffman’s “humble insight”, as Roger Koppl and colleagues put it, is that “evolution happens one step at a time.”

The origins of hip hop is the story of a musical revolution that occurred through many incremental innovations that coalesced into a broader pattern, with little foresight as to what the future of youth culture might look like. Herc and Flash were simply exploring new possibilities and responding to what was right in front of them—a process that scientists increasingly argue is a direct cultural extension of biological evolution. Evolution happens one step at a time, and revolutions happen when those steps occur in relatively quick succession.

The theory of the adjacent possible recognises that novel forms very rarely, if ever, come in to being ex nihilo (from nothing). In biological evolution, sexual reproduction acts as a combinatorial engine, shuffling pre-existing genetic structures, with the odd mutation adding further novel code. Indeed, the evolutionary origins of sex are explained by its ability to combine advantageous mutations from different lineages faster than asexual reproduction could achieve alone, while also providing a way to get rid of harmful mutations.

When existing elements stay in their familiar roles, mixing them together produces predictable results. By contrast, radical novelty emerges when configurations are thrust into a new context, causing them to perform entirely unexpected functions. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba call this repurposing “exaptation”. A classic example from nature, provided by Kauffman, is the swim bladder found in most bony fish, which began as a primitive lung before shifting function along some evolutionary pathways to enable buoyancy control.

The concept of the adjacent possible was introduced to a broader audience by the writer Steven Johnson, who describes it as “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” Johnson uses the metaphor of a house in which each time you open a door and step into a new room, new doors are revealed that lead to rooms that did not exist before. Through both combination and exaptation, biological and cultural systems unlock new doors within the adjacent possible.

Introducing homo tinkerus

“Hip hop comes from everything. Hip hop is funk and rock and soul and jazz. It’s gospel and toasts and nursery rhymes…Hip hop is also politics and technology...But more importantly, it’s all these things put together.”
- Shad Kabango., rapper and broadcaster

The emergence of hip hop in the 1970s created a novel cultural niche, bringing together DJs, MCs, breakers, and graffiti artists. Yet none of these elements were brand new. All had precedents, or multiple precedents, often with their own long prior histories. In the early 1970s hip hop was an adjacent possible, ready to be realised by the cultural innovators of the Bronx. It wasn’t bound to happen, but all the pieces were in place to make it possible.

In those formative few years, numerous novel combinations and exaptations came to be. The first party combined rhythmic talking with a new DJ technique developed to meet the latent needs of the breakers. As Murray Forman and Mark Neal write, the breakers were themselves blending kung-fu moves and the footwork of James Brown into a new form of dance. James Brown, in turn, was building on a long tradition of Afro-American dances, including the Lindy and the Charleston, as well as dances from the Caribbean and South America.

Flash took Herc’s innovations further, combining a new technique to manipulate records with a modified sound system, including high-torque turntables and a spherical stylus. He invented the slipmat to solve a mechanical friction problem, finding a new use for starch-stiffened felt. Both Herc and Flash ultimately co-opted the record deck to turn it from a passive playback device into a live instrument, opening the door for further innovations in turntable design.

In “The Origin of Wealth”, Eric Beinhocker argues that the history of human innovation is a history of tinkering. In “Antifragile”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the term “antifragile tinkering” to describe such practices with low-cost mistakes and large potential gains. Tinkering is also equated with the French word bricolage, introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe the practice of making do with “whatever is at hand”. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur is a creative problem-solver who adapts readily-available materials to meet immediate needs.

However, biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti and colleagues argue that explorative tinkering goes beyond Lévi-Strauss’s characterisation of bricolage. Bricolage, in its original usage, does not necessarily imply a drive towards novelty. It may suggest only the reuse of local tools and materials to carry out a task that might otherwise have required brought-in resources. But open-ended tinkering also occurs in highly-specialised fields where trial-and-error requires deep experience of the domain and the possible ways in which things can be combined.

There is a line of argument that cultural change and economic development owe less to academic theorising than is often assumed, and more to tinkering. Taleb accuses academics of “lecturing birds how to fly” by merely explaining how things work in retrospect, after they have been brought forth into the world by the blind tinkering of biological evolution or human acts of creativity, ingenuity, and intelligent search. As Cazzola Gatti and colleagues put it, “If progress comes from tinkering, not thinkering, then we may justly speak of ‘Homo tinkerus’.”

Sources

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